Recently, additive manufacturing methods for making metal alloy components have emerged as alternatives to casting and machining methods. Additive manufacturing is also referred to as “layered manufacturing,” “reverse machining,” and “3-D printing.” On a basic level, additive manufacturing technologies are based on the concept of building up material in a cross-sectional layer-by-layer to form a 3D component. Common to additive manufacturing technologies is the use of a 3D modeling software (Computer Aided Design or CAD), machine equipment, and layering material. Once a CAD sketch is produced, the machine equipment reads in data from the CAD file and adds successive layers of a desired material to fabricate the 3D component.
Some specific additive manufacturing processes employ a powder bed fusion technique to fuse metal alloy powder in additive steps to produce a component. For example, some additive manufacturing processes utilize a beam of energy that is scanned across a powder bed to fuse a layer of metal alloy powder in the powder bed in additive steps. Some examples of such powder bed additive manufacturing processes include direct metal laser sintering/fusion (DMLS)/(DMLF), selective laser sintering/fusion (SLS)/(SLF), and electron beam melting (EBM). In these processes, a layer of metal alloy powder in the powder bed is fused to an underlying partially-formed component (or a seed component) to add a new layer to the component. A new layer of metal alloy powder is deposited into the powder bed and over the previously formed layer of the partially-formed component, and the new layer of metal alloy powder is similarly fused to the component. The depositing-and-fusing procedure is repeated a number of times to produce a plurality of layers on the partially formed component to, ultimately, form the metal alloy component.